Vanity Fair

My parents spent the 1970s on communes: first, a shared house in Boulder; after that, a “self-realization fellowship” in Paonia, Colorado; then the Spring Hollow farm in Tennessee, with a dozen other couples. They were out to save the world, or at least themselves. Peace, love, and understanding.

Creative Nonfiction

When you watch a man on the tracks before an oncoming train, that’s exactly what you do: watch. You can shout at him. You can yell, “Train!” You can grip your New Yorker and suck in your breath. You can exhale when the Brooklyn-bound A stops twenty feet short. You can widen your eyes when the man stumbles in your direction, toward the platform where you await the Manhattan-bound A.

Midnight Breakfast

Never write from a place of despair, especially if it is your thirty-third birthday and you have just spent far too much on a Japanese notebook and a pen that looks like a pencil. Never write from a place of despair in your brand-new Japanese notebook with your pencil-looking pen if you are sinking in the shadow of last night on a train to Harlem with a five-count of Cinco de Mayo churros and you are wondering what it all means.

The Rumpus

When I lie on your couch in early autumn, my hair wet from your shower, my body in your clothes, my head in the divot of your bare chest, your lips meeting my scalp, I recall the Rumi poem my ex-husband recited at our wedding, “When the night sky pours by it’s really a crowd of beggars wanting this.” This, I think, this we have now.

Gawker

Four years ago, a woman I love—a friend who felt sisterly and vibrant—died of breast cancer. She was 33. I feel like I must spell it out: thirty-three. I want to paint it on a brick wall in the middle of the night. I want to wear it like the scarlet letter A. I want every billboard to read two numbers: 3 and 3.